The Meme Machine

SEX IN THE MODERN WORLD 133
This suggests that coevolution and memetic driving cannot occur with only
vertical transmission of memes. So we should note at this point that all the
examples I have given of memetic driving involve at least some element of
horizontal transmission. I suggested, for example, that people imitate the best
imitators. This entails horizontal or oblique transmission, as does the creation of
language, since you cannot easily have a language community in which people
speak only to their parents and children.
Where memes are transmitted horizontally they can travel quite
independently of the genes. An idea may be passed from one person to another,
and then another, within one generation. Also memes may spread when they are
useful, neutral or even positively harmful; such as an untrue explanation, an
addictive habit, or a piece of malicious gossip. Only when horizontal
transmission becomes common can the memes really be said to be independent
of the genes.
Modern industrialised life is a world of horizontal transmission. We still
learn our mother-tongue from our mothers, and many of our habits and ideals
too. People are still overwhelmingly more likely to follow the religion of their
parents than any other religion, and even to vote the same way as their parents
did. However, our parents have less and less sway as we get older and we now
go on learning more or less throughout our lives. Our main sources of
information are sources that did not exist in our long evolutionary past: schools,
radio, television, newspapers, books and magazines, and lots and lots of friends
and acquaintances widely spread around the city, the country, and even the
world.
The more ways there are for memes to spread, and the faster they can go, the
less they are constrained by the needs of the genes. What determines the success
of a meme in a traditional hunter-gatherer society, or even a simple farming
society, is quite different from what determines its success in a modern
industrialised society. In the former, life changes slowly, transmission is largely
‘vertical, and a meme is most likely to succeed if it benefits (or at least appears
to benefit) the health, longevity, and reproductive success of its carrier. In the
latter, a meme is most likely to succeed if it can get quickly and efficiently from
host to host, and never mind how well each host does in terms of either its own
survival or its reproductive success – as long as there are more hosts around to
infect. We now live in this latter kind of society and the memes have utterly
changed – and continue to change – the way we live.
We can now return to the subject of sex and sex memes. For the sake of
simplicity I am going to divide societies into just two types, realising that there
are lots of gradations in between and few are purely one or the other. These are
Societies in which memes are largely transmitted vertically and thus track the